Kodak EZ200

It doesn't get much easier than the aptly named Kodak EZ200. The shirt-pocketsize charcoal and silver camera, with 4MB of internal memory, shoots both VGA stills and up to 5 seconds of video (without sound). The shutter and power buttons are to the right of the control panel on top of the camera. When you use the single-mode button, the icon changes, and the camera conveniently beeps. Like its ancestors, the EZ200 makes a ko-dak sound when the shutter is pressed and an image captured (which is how the company got its name). The EZ200 is a bargain if you want a still camera and a Web camera in one device, but it's not our first choice for a standalone still camera.

The EZ200 makes an excellent Webcam, though. Resolution, color, and sharpness are excellent, and the camera's ability to adjust quickly to changing lighting conditions is impressivewhen it's connected to the computer. But when not in Webcam mode, the camera suffers from two important drawbacks: no flash and a lens that must be put in the focus-free mode to take a shot.

The EZ200 generally adapts well to lighting conditions, but without a flash, indoor and backlit pictures can be dark and poorly exposed. And the camera is designed to focus down 2 inches when it's being used as a Web camera, but as a still camera, it must be used in fixed-focus mode, with no macros possible. Image quality is average or above; details are well defined, and colors are generally accurate but oversaturated and somewhat contrasty.

Sally Wiener Grotta is a contributing editor of PC Magazine, a professional photographer, a digital artist, and an early pioneer in computer graphics. She has coauthored several books with Daniel Grotta, including The Illustrated Digital...

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